


every time the earth turns / i'm reminded that night is only half the time

by zeitgeistofnow



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ba Sing Se, Character Study, Gen, Lesbian Yue (Avatar), Platonic Relationships, Yue (Avatar) Lives, anyway.. i love yue a lot!! so much!!, this is super rambly and has no plot but haha i don't care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:22:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26205628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeitgeistofnow/pseuds/zeitgeistofnow
Summary: “uh, good night,” sokka says, standing on the thatched straw and stretching his arms above his head. sokka had been sitting next to yue on the rooftop for an hour, staving off insomnia by not even trying, by the knowledge that the crawling darkness won’t come until they’re both safe and wrapped in blankets. they had breathed in sync for an hour, but sokka had finally stood up to go inside, to face nightmares alone.he always was braver in everyday situations, the first to fight, the first to scream louder than yue would ever dare to. the last to rationalize sacrifice as the right choice.
Relationships: Sokka & Yue (Avatar)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 28





	every time the earth turns / i'm reminded that night is only half the time

**Author's Note:**

> title is from _so far away_ by mary lambert which is SUCH a yueki song. this isn't a yueki fic but just trust me. also it's a good song and occasionally makes me cry

“Uh, good night,” Sokka says, standing on the thatched straw and stretching his arms above his head. Sokka had been sitting next to Yue on the rooftop for an hour, staving off insomnia by not ever trying, by the knowledge that the crawling darkness won’t come until they’re both safe and wrapped in blankets. They had breathed in sync for an hour, but Sokka had finally stood up to go inside, to face nightmares alone.

He always was braver in everyday situations, the first to fight, the first to scream louder than Yue would ever dare to. The last to rationalize sacrifice as the right choice. 

“I’ll come to bed soon,” Yue says, leaning back as he leaves and trying to ignore the straw digging into her shoulders. His footsteps are nothing but quiet rustling until he jumps down into the bushes, and then they’re completely silent on the soft grass, obscured by crickets and frogs serenading their lovers. 

She immediately misses the weight of him at her side, the space of the roof where there’s now only bright, open air. The stars above her boast about their closeness, about how they appear not even an inch apart. They weave a tapestry of relationships above her, every culture and every nation having a different story for them, different lives and different links. It seems like a wonderful life, and Yue remembers wishing for it when she was young, to be above it all and close to everyone she loves. 

A book that Yue had found in the library in the desert had whispered that every star is further away from the next than Yue could imagine, worlds and worlds spanning the lines connecting constellations. It had been a strangely difficult revelation for something as easily scientific as the stars. Yue thinks that all pretty lies die hard, though. Ba Sing Se is certainly proof of that. 

She inhales, the night air twisting around her. 

It doesn’t taste the same since she lost the moon’s blessing, some of the metallic sheen to it lost when Yue’s hair returned to cool brown and her waterbending pressed itself against Tui’s lifeless body, breathing something into the spirit Yue didn’t know her lungs held. She doesn’t mind. The night had always been slightly bitter to her, and finding it sweet again is a revelation of a completely different sort than the stars. 

Tui is in the sky behind her, only a few dozen minutes above the horizon, and Yue can’t see her unless she turns her head. It feels nice to look away, nice to have repaid her debts. It feels guilty, too. Yue always feels guilty now.

Her fingers find their place right below her collarbone, the place where the stone of her engagement necklace would rest if she were still wearing it. She can easily imagine the smoothness of the leather band, the weight of the stone and the sheen when she saw herself in the mirror. She doesn’t like to, though, and it’s only a moment until she moves her hand back to rest on her chest. 

It’s only another few minutes of deep breaths and cricket-conducted silence before Yue eases herself off the edge of the roof and wanders back into the bedroom, pressing herself against Sokka’s side and trying to match their breathing again, as easy in sleep as in waking.

Yue’s necklace is an easy way of quantifying her honor, the ease in how she slips into the role of martyr without too many thoughts to her own heartbeats. It’s easy to leave the necklace behind, even to leave behind her fiance. It’s harder to leave behind something she believed was part of her for so long. 

On the other side of Ba Sing Se, Zuko sits on an almost identical roof and runs his fingers through still-newly short hair, staring up at the same constellations alone. 

When Yue wakes, sweaty and sleep-logged, Tui is still gracefully lounging in mid-sky. Sokka is on the cot next to her, a thin blanket flung over his head and only one of his socks still on. He snores quietly, Yue knows, but there’s a fuzziness in the air that makes it hard to properly hear. 

She hauls herself into an upright position and wipes her brow with one hand. It comes away damp and her half-asleep body doesn’t quite register that as anything but what it is. The world seems hazy and she seems hazy with it, the lines between where her body starts and the world begins subject to debate. 

Yue walks into the bathroom without quite realizing she’s doing it, shirtless and wrapped in the thin sheet from her bed. It feels like parchment when she doesn’t think about it, like the countless stories buried in the library they left behind, like hundreds of years of traditions and histories.

She doesn’t remember her dream, just remembers a feeling of loss. She doesn’t know if the loss was part of the nightmare or if it came with the waking. She always knows when she’s dreaming because she always feels lighter, none of the responsibilities of the day weighing on her shoulders. Even when she’s clutching countless bodies, when she’s watching Tui die over and over, watching the world go gray, there’s something inimitable about the feeling of  _ tomorrow,  _ of having to wake up and continue. 

The tile floor is cool beneath her feet, fine in an unimaginably different way than Yue’s home. Everything is so much different here. Opener, and it makes Yue feel defenseless. She’s used to fighting with her back against a wall, but there’s no walls here to stand against. She and Sokka fall asleep with their backs to each other when they travel, Sokka’s boomerang and Yue’s hunting knife an arms reach from them both, a little lighter in the knowledge that they’ll be able to catch each other if something goes wrong. They’re both good at that. Catching each other, protecting. 

Yue has to grip the edges of the sink’s basin to keep the late-night’s fuzziness from stealing her away and when she meets her eyes in the mirror she looks almost ghostly, eyes paler than they should be, silver sheen to her hair. It hasn’t been more than a month or two of seeing dark hair when she looks in the mirror and when she sees it silver again in the moonlight, half-dreamy, it seems off but not in a way that matters. It looks how her betrothal necklace did, weighty in its elegance.

She takes a breath in, then a breath out. Seeing herself in the mirror, so solidly standing in the bathroom with her feet against tile and her hands against porcelain sink, makes me realize that there’s no way she has the energy to make it back to the bed, to where Sokka snores quietly and a few more sheets lie squished to the end of the bed. Her decision to fall asleep in the bathroom, just the rote action of allowing herself into a sitting position and leaning against the edge of the bathtub.

She used to have a certain luminescence in the night, pale glow when she stared hard enough at her forearms or the strands of her hair. Now she looks like everyone else, lost and shrouded in a darkness she doesn’t understand.

Yue falls asleep against the bathtub, body slumped and face craned up at the sky.

They’ve been in Ba Sing Se for a little over a week, waiting for the chess players to make their move, waiting to stop feeling like pawns and start feeling like people again, waiting to leave. Chess pieces have erratic sleep schedules, they find.

When Sokka finds Yue floor of the bathroom, early-early in the morning, he lies down next to her. His head fits just right in her lap and the tips of her hair tickle at his shoulders. 

When Yue yawns and opens her eyes, automatically sweeping her hair out of her face, Sokka is sprawled on the floor with her, hair down and in a tangled mess on his head. The sun creeps higher on the horizon as Yue sits and finger-combs Sokka’s hair, moving carefully in an effort to get rid of the stickiness in her joints from sleeping sitting up without waking the other boy. 

Her eyelashes are crusty with sleep and a spot just above her elbow is starting to throb, reminding of the fall she took the night before, but she doesn’t have the energy to lift her arms, to do anything but keep carding her hands through the long part of Sokka’s hair, moonstone brown and thick. 

It’s at least a half-hour of this, Yue staring blankly at the horizon out one of the countless windows and Sokka snoring against her thigh, before Sokka wakes up with a quiet  _ snrk  _ noise. He immediately raises his hand to put it over Yue’s. It’s cold from where it had been lying against the tile floor and his fingers are fine and smooth, just like Yue’s. When she was younger her mother would tell stories about the seafaring people of the Southern Water Tribes, with callused fingers from ropes. Yue supposes Sokka’s hands are a sign he doesn’t sail much, although she’s never asked why, only been grateful for the casual affection. When Sokka takes Yue’s hand it feels like an inside joke, the way their friendship can masquerade itself.

It feels guilty, too, like Yue should be doing more for him than offering a hand and a smile. She knows that he would never ask anything more from her and that she would never offer, but it still feels like she’s taking advantage of his infatuation to find friendship in his smile. Sokka’s smile is easy, though, even when her eyes tighten when people call them a couple, even when he tries to kiss her under the moon and she steps away. 

Yue sometimes wonders how practiced that smile is, and then decides that hers is just as performative sometimes and she has no business prying into emotions Sokka keeps hidden. 

“Morning,” Sokka mumbles, voice heavy and soft. He sounds older like this and younger all at the same time. “Why’re we in the bathroom?”

“I woke up,” Yue says, “and then just kinda fell here.” Her voice is scratchy too. “Why are  _ you  _ in the bathroom?”

Silence, then, “nightmare,” Sokka says shortly. “You weren’t next to me, either, but you always go for the mirrors when you wake up at night so I figured I should check before I freaked out.”

“Huh,” Yue says. She hadn’t even noticed her late-night affinity for mirrors, but she supposes it’s not surprising. Seeing herself is solidifying, an insistence on the point of time that she’s present in, not any others. She looks how she does today and she never will again. 

She clears her throat and tangles her fingers through Sokka’s. “Well. Good morning.”

Sokka’s smile is bright and sleepy, just like the early morning sun. “Good morning.”

**Author's Note:**

> \- this wasn't even one of my wips!! UGH i hate myself i was like ok i have like 10 things i'm in the middle of i should write those and i was like haha nope i'll start rambly oneshot about yue so i did and then i decided half of it didn't match the tone so i split that into another fic and ugh. i have way too many things i'm writing but look out for another fic in the works currently titled "five times sokka and yue talked about their crushes and one time their crushes talked about them"  
> \- i DO love this girl SO MUCH though.. incredible. she's so gorgeous. i love her. i hope she lives forever. i hope she's smiling down at me when i stargaze. i hope she's happy.  
> \- this is from my yue lives au!! i wrote this fic mostly for myself so i worry that some details weren't explained well enough but if u want to read more about the au there's a "headcanons" post [here](https://yearning-hours.tumblr.com/post/627026325026291712/anyway-no-one-asked-but-yue-joins-the-gaang)! it's honestly just a fic outline for something i'll probably never write but WHATEVER.  
> \- okay there we go!! you can find me on tumblr [@lazypigeon](https://lazypigeon.tumblr.com/)!! thank u for reading :D


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